Manoosi Khetsi-Likila Council COE

Manoosi Khetsi is a well-respected and very powerful woman in her village, both in politics and in other social development activities.

She is the councillor at Likila Council from the Tsime village where she also works as a village health worker and that is where all these started and her first love for community development.

Khetsi first encountered with  Gender Links (GL) way back in  2010 during the workshop held for women who were standing in for local government elections, she was fearless powerful and strong. She believed in herself and the confidence was just too amazing, she looked like she had already won the elections.  She had stood in under her political party and everything was so easy in terms of campaigns as most of them were done by the leader of the party and she won those. She then met with GL again when it conducting Centres of Excellence (COE) workshop at Likila council where she is a councillor at.

She worked very hard at the council and she was later elected as the chairperson of the council. She pushed gender issues to top and she was making sure that all the issues are taken in to serious and encouraged her fellow women to participate in all the council’s decisions making and all the issues related to them. She would hold lots of public gatherings to teach her fellow community members about gender issues and how women and men can share house hold chores without even thinking that certain chores are for only women.

She participated in all most Lesotho Summits and she won the category of leadership where she presented at the Regional where she gained lots of experience through sharing good practices with other people around SADC countries. Since she had realized that their main challenge in her village was high rate of people living with HIV she worked very hard to see that people learn about the disease and also to encourage men to join support groups as most of the support group members were women and it was difficult sometimes to help men. She mentioned with happiness that now more men understand the importance of being part of support groups in their villages and also to help women as to off load all the burden from them.

When Lesotho was going for the elections again in 2017 she thought of standing in as an independent candidate as she felt it was right time and believed that she has gained so much experience from GL trainings and interactions with other COE councils, she resigned from her political party and that was her beginning of her problems. People mocked her and told her that there was no way she could win those elections as an independent and worse being a woman but she worked very hard and wanted to prove them  wrong that  there is nothing men can do that she cannot also do as long as they are not doing it with their private parts. Some women also joined those men and campaigned against her, but she was not shaken at all because she believed in herself and what she was taught.

She holds public gatherings in different villages as to encourage people especial women to vote for her and surprisingly more promised to vote for her as they believed in what she was promising and also knowing that she is hard working woman. Now she is working with different departments to see that they assist her to bring clean water in her villages as she had seen it was still a challenge as women would travel long distances to fetch water and sometimes old and girls would be raped. So she is a final process to boreholes and taps within the villages, also working closely with clinics that around to see that they help support group members with trainings and things they that need when assisting sick people.

In closing she highlighted that her job is very challenging as she serves a remote village of Lesotho, particularly in this era of HIV and AIDS, but she is never loosing hope and deeply involved in care work and has encouraged many women and men to join the care work to support those living with HIV and other related diseases within the village and also to encourage pregnant women go for their tests and to make sure that even if they are positive they bring HIV free children.